Perchance To Dream

Oh my goodness, I'm a weepy mess. Maybe because I haven't slept this week. Well, I finally slept last night because I knocked myself out with an Ambien, but for the four (!) nights previous I averaged about two hours. Why? Hmm. Maybe because we're back on this inhumane school schedule of waking in the dark. Maybe because I had a big audition this week.

Oh yeah, the audition. I had high hopes for this one. I worked really diligently with my voice coach over the holidays, and practiced like crazy with my headphones and my little recordings. My coach was pushing me to go for broke, and chose the hardest part of the song--it was the Barbara Streisand version of "Luck Be A Lady," and as he put it--"Babs likes those chords a little crunchy." The last section has crazy runs up and down the octave and three incredibly long held notes in soprano (read: not really my) range on which occasionally I would crack like a 13-year-old boy. And the fear of that...not a great confidence-builder.

Anyway, enough with the excuses. The one thing I can be proud of is how hard I worked. But at the audition itself, the keyboard was so much slower than I recognized, giving me lots of opportunity to get warbly and "pitchy, dawg." Plus he said some alarming stuff like "So these few bars, you'll just ad-lib?" and and I should have immediately said "WHAT? I will do no such thing."

Then there was a dance combination, and all the leggy teens were warming up in their tights and their stretchy jazz baby shoes, while I was looking ridiculous in my audition dress. I have to confess, learning the combination was great fun, though difficult, even when a wheezing old guy with a gray beard punched me in the ass while flailing around and it hurt an amazing amount. I soldiered on, and don't think I embarrassed myself too much.

But I didn't get a callback, and I was sad, and that disturbed my sleep, too. Second musical audition, second time without a callback. Right here is the moment where I have to stretch out my remaining confidence like taffy and little cracks and fissures start to emerge. But what can I do? I really want to sing, on stage, doing choreography, with a bunch of people, in a really big show. I guess I just have to keep working. And trusting my instincts. I can sing the HELL out of the slow open for "Luck Be A Lady." I should have done that, even if it didn't "showcase" a range that I may or may not have, depending on the day or the occasion.

Oh, so the weepiness. Yeah, over everything. I wept over Modern Family last night because Phil was waiting for a call from his doctor and I was having flashbacks. I wept copiously while reading Jarrah the dread Chapter 8 ("The Easter Eggs") from Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy (some of those chapters came back to me like a song in my heart, but I had sort of blocked Chapter 8, and now I know why...Baby Bee dies.) Jarrah watched my face carefully, with light perplexity, as my voice cracked and quavered over Betsy's attempts to console her best friend after her sister's death.

She didn't see me burst into tears in her classroom the day before, since I turned my face to the wall. There is a new poster display in there that is called something like "Making Friends On The Playground."

1. You can go up to anyone you like and ask them to be your friend.

2. You are allowed to say yes when someone asks you to be their friend.

3. The number of people you should ask to be your friend before coming to find me:

1.
2.
3.

Oh, the horror, the horror! I wasn't sure what I was feeling, but I didn't like it. And turns out this sleep thing is really useful for helping us to manage our responses to the world.